As lifestyles become more hectic, there is an ever-increasing demand for time saving devices in the kitchen. One desirable technique is to prepare a meal the night before and put it in an oven or slow cooker at the appropriate time. This presents several problems, not the least of which is that one has to be home and remember to put the meal in the oven or slow cooker. For many decades, oven timers have easily dealt with these problems, but left the uncooked meal sitting at room temperature for a number of hours before the cooking process was started. Leaving uncooked food, especially meats, for too long a period of time is unsafe.
Consequently, combination appliances were created that included both a cooking element and a refrigeration element. These elements, however, were separate from each other; creating complex devices that were expensive to manufacture and difficult to maintain. For example, a microwave has been combined with a plumbed refrigeration system. Another combination has been a resistive heating element combined with a plumbed refrigeration system.
Peltier devices, also called thermoelectric devices, are solid-state devices that act as a heat pump when current is passed through the device. Essentially, during use, heat is pumped from one side of the Peltier device to the other. Consequently, one side tends to increase in temperature, the hot side, and the other side tends to decrease in temperature, the cold side. A very useful feature of the Peltier device is that reversing the direction of the current reverses the direction of heat flow and flips the hot and cold sides. For consistency, we herein adopt the often used labels “active” and “waste”. The active side provides heating and/or cooling to a desired element through some thermal connection.
Recently, combination appliances utilizing Peltier devices have been produced. For example, a Peltier device in combination with microwave and/or resistance element heating is under development by TMIO. The Peltier device provides the cooling and the microwave provides the cooking. In this situation, the microwave element is necessary to achieve relatively short cooking times. By selecting different time-temperature profiles, different foods or combinations thereof, the need for the microwave disappears and it becomes an extraneous temperature regulation system that may be eliminated. Temperature regulation, used herein means the input or removal of thermal energy, heating or cooling, to achieve a desired temperature.
Other systems are primarily combinations of freezers and defrosters where a plumbed refrigeration system is utilized to freeze food and the Peltier devices provides heat to thaw the food in preparation for cooking. In either the heating or cooling situation, it would be desirable to eliminate the extraneous temperature regulation system (e.g. a microwave module or a plumbed refrigeration system) to an appliance that is cost effective to manufacture and maintain.
One perceived drawback of Peltier devices is that the heating/cooling (i.e. temperature regulation) is concentrated in one spot and thus may create undesirable thermal gradients. To overcome this problem, active side distribution systems have been included in appliances that utilize Peltier devices. These distribution systems typically include a working fluid, water or air for example, that is moved from the Peltier device to the volume of interest (e.g. the cook vessel) via pumps or fans and may be called active side motive distributions systems. The uneven temperature regulation problem has also been solved through the use of the extraneous temperature regulation systems described above. For example, a plumbed refrigeration system can be routed so as to provide relatively even cooling. It would be desirable to eliminate such an extra system.
Another desirable feature would be the ability to modify the cook timeline from a remote location. For example, when plans change, there is no way of preventing preset operations to occur. Thus, if plans change the food may not be in the desired condition at a later (earlier) time.
The inventor has recognized solutions to one or more of the above-mentioned problems.